Carhaix Journal; Sowing a Language's Seed in Brittany

By JAMES M. MARKHAM, Special to the New York Times

Published: October 31, 1987

CARHAIX, France, Oct. 27—
Now 50 years old, Yann Puillandre still remembers the hurt. When he was caught speaking Breton in class, his teacher would hang a wooden shoe around his neck, a stigma that could be lifted only by denouncing another schoolmate who had let slip a few words of the ancient Celtic language.

At the end of the school day, the child who ended up with the shoe was kept an extra hour, which meant that he had to creep home alone in the fearful, misty darkness in a rugged countryside thought to be peopled with spirits and ghosts.

Across the Brittany peninsula in northwestern France, similar punishments were inflicted on several generations of Breton schoolchildren in a systematic effort to impose the French language on a proud and stubborn people. In 1947, a Socialist Education Minister in Paris, Marcel-Edmond Naegelen, declared that French teachers in Brittany had the same task as their counterparts in colonial Algeria - ''assimilate the population at any price.'' 'We Were Traumatized'

''We were traumatized, completely depersonalized,'' said Mr. Puillandre, a farmer with big hands and a disconcerting gaze. ''And the worst thing is that most people stopped speaking Breton to their children, because they had been told that it was primitive and French was the language of civilization and opportunity.''

Some Bretons have now come to the rescue of their language, but many fear it is too late. Although Paris has made some concessions to regional sentiment, it has retained an iron grip on education, and the Bretons - like the Basques, Corsicans, Catalans and other linguistic minorities - have wavered and been divided in the struggle against French centralism.

The ruddy Mr. Puillandre took the idea of struggle literally and joined an ineffectual terrorist movement called the Brittany Liberation Front, which set off bombs at police stations and tax collection offices, accidentally killing two Front members but no one else. The Front was wiped out by stern police action in the late 1970's, and Mr. Puillandre spent four years in a Paris prison. Throwing Eggs, Not Bombs

He and other Breton nationalists have in the last few years adopted gentler but also more visible methods, tossing tar-filled eggs at road signs bearing French rather than Breton names - Chateauneuf-du-Faou, for example, instead of Kastellneves-ar-Faou. When caught, the egg-tossers refuse to speak anything but Breton in court; the state has retaliated by deducting huge fines from their salaries.

Yet their tenacity has won a rare battle for the forlorn Breton cause. After weighing the cost of repainting and replacing smudged signs across the rolling Breton countryside, the central Government has grudingly given permission for bilingual signposting in the region.

Carhaix, an austere town of 10,000 that rests on a small plateau in cattle-raising country deep in western Brittany, was one of the first municipalities to embrace bilingual sign-posting. This is at first surprising because Carhaix has a Communist mayor, Jean-Pierre Jeudy, and a town council controlled by Communists and Socialists; both parties have been resistant to Breton nationalism. An Old Question of Loyalty

Another trauma explains the left's stance. When the Nazis occupied Brittany, some Breton nationalists took a cue from the Irish Celts - whose opportunistic motto was ''English difficulty, Irish opportunity'' - and sided with the Germans in the hope of gaining autonomy. About 100 Breton militants went so far as to enroll in the Nazis' elite SS fighting units.

Yves Riou, a 69-year-old Socialist member of the town council, grew up speaking Breton but said he remained ''marked'' by witnessing ''Bretons making martyrs out of other Bretons by denouncing them to the Gestapo.''

''I was the commander of the Resistance here,'' he said.

''It is too bad that Breton is being lost,'' Mr. Riou continued. ''But other things have been lost. The horse gave way to the automobile. Latin disappeared as a spoken language. The Bretons cannot turn in on themselves - they have to be open to the world.''

Jean-Pierre Duval, a well-known champion of Breton who teaches the language in Rennes but has a house here, said that after the war he was denounced as a Nazi when he took part in the first demonstrations for the revival of Brittany's heritage.

''But now we have reached the state where speaking your own language in your own land makes you a marginal person,'' said Mr. Duval, a founder of the Democratic Breton Union, a party that like other autonomist groups has had minimal electoral impact. ''When I speak Breton to my kids in Rennes people look at me as if I were a strange animal.'' Language of the Elderly

The French state conducts no language census, but it is thought that 400,000 to 600,000 of Brittany's 2.7 million inhabitants speak Breton. Yet they are mostly elderly people living in the countryside.

To check Breton's slow death, militants a decade ago founded the Diwan movement of independent Breton-language nursery and elementary schools. There are now 18 of them, mostly in western Brittany, but they have only 430 children and both Socialist and rightist education ministers in Paris over the years have given them meager assistance.

In Carhaix, the first Diwan - the word means ''seed'' in Breton -opened in a garage three years ago. The debate over whether to assist it split the town council and the local Communist Party. But Mayor Jeudy, a 43-year-old schoolteacher, sided with the Diwan and secured some financing for the project.

''I felt the start that Breton was a reality here - and a richness,'' said Mayor Jeudy, who married into the language. ''As for the collaborationist argument, I say that Hitler spoke German and we continue to study German.''

The Carhaix Diwan has moved into some abandoned Quonset huts, where 22 kindergartners learn in Breton and French. Jean-Jacques Hassold, one of the school's two teachers, likened the modest Diwan undertaking to the Zionists' decision to revive the Hebrew language in Palestine.

''We are doing something that has never been done before in the history of Brittany,'' the intense Mr. Hassold said, hushing a brood of children who called out to him by his first name. ''We are in the process of overcoming the shame that has been imposed on us. And we are doing it thanks to the kids.''

Map of Brittany region of France; photo of Jean-Jacques Hassold teaching geography in Breton language at Diwan school in Carhaix, France (Agence France-Presse/Philippe Huguen for NYT)